Movie Review- The Mutilator (1985)

The Mutilator is an oddity; it is the apotheosis of the slasher film, but it came out several years after the subgenre's boom in the early 1980's. It's an endearingly ramshackle film. It is appparent that everyone involved making this film was having a grand old time, and never taking themselves too seriously. Any slasher film that features a catchy shag song as its theme has clearly placed fun as its chief priority.

The story is effectively simple. In an opening flashback, a young boy named Ed accidentally shoots and kills his mother. Flash forward years later and the young boy is now a 20something-pretending-to-be-a-college-student headed to a North Carolina beach house for some fall break shenanigans with his friends. Unfortunately, when they arrive, Ed's father is still hanging around, and Dad is still upset about the whole "dead wife" incident. And so he stalks and kills the nubile youngsters in the classic slasher formula.

My personal meter of slasher film quality is its ability to successfully provide a variant on a well-worn theme. This usually amounts to "Are the horror parts inventive?" and "Are the non-horror parts engaging?". The Mutilator's villain is just a crotchety old guy, so nothing particularly scary there. But if nothing else, this film is dedicated to its cheap thrills and presents gory scenes that still manage to shock today. The filler in between the audience-attracting violence is where the film's charm lies. The sloppy technical details are endearing in a way. There is no consistency between night and day shots; characters continually walk in from the moonlit beach to the sunlit beach house. The comic relief character Ralph is operating on some strange manic level of existence that is always entertaining. The music cues often drown out dialogue, and so on. This is not a so-bad-it's-good film, the movie is having too much fun with itself to be truly bad. This is a film that invites you to have fun alongside it, not at its own expense. The Mutilator set out a modest goal to be a lunkheaded slasher film, and not only does it achieve that goal, it manages to  have fun in the process. With a narrow subgenre like slashers, that bit of fun is all I ask for.